By Eileen Moon
ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS – In April, still in the early weeks of the COVID-19 quarantine, master printmaker and photo retouching artist Adam Sanders embarked on a project that has become a work of living history; evidence of how the power of an idea can bring a community together in a time of worry and isolation.
Sanders is the photographer featured in the Atlantic Highlands Arts Council’s current exhibit, “Dear Neighbor: A Covid Diary of a Small Town,” on display at the arts council gallery at 54 First Ave. through Oct. 17.
“Dear Neighbor” features 48 photographic prints of residents of this town of about 4,500 people in a variety of moods and poses, all taken from the outside looking in as night fell on another day in quarantine.
Here is the Curry family, standing at the door of the house that has been in their family for five generations.
Here are Marilyn and Mike Scherfen at a table,working one of the puzzles they’ve pieced together day by day.
And here is Michael Cerame and his girlfriend, Molly Shea, as Michael, a paramedic, leaves for another 12-hour shift fighting for the lives of COVID-19 patients.
Sydney and Corinna Thuss dressed up for their photo. Sanders’ exhibit features 48 photographic prints of Atlantic Highlands residents.
The subjects featured in the exhibit include people Sanders already knew as well as a number of complete strangers, all of whom responded when he posted a brief note on the Atlantic Highlands Face-
book page asking for volunteers willing to be photographed in the cocoons in which they’d sheltered as the weeks rolled by.
In his professional life, Sanders works with photographers from the fashion and fine arts community to help them realize their visions by refining and enhancing their work. But as his client base dwindled due to the pandemic and he found himself with free time, he began to think about taking some photos of his own.
Many years earlier, Sanders had encountered the work of Japanese photographer, Shizuka Yokomizo, who had walked around London taking photographs of people living in basement apartments. Yokomizo would write notes to the occupants, asking their permission for her to photograph them from outside their windows, telling them they would not otherwise meet. She asked potential subjects to leave their drapes open at a certain day and time if they were willing to participate or closed if they weren’t. The result was a project she titled “Dear Stranger.”
“The pictures are haunting,” Sanders said. “They stuck with me for 20 years and, during the pandemic, it just bubbled back up.”
It proved to be the inspiration for his effort to document life in the time of COVID-19 in his own small town.
“It just very naturally went from the idea of ‘Dear Stranger’ to ‘Dear Neighbor,’ ” Sanders said.
Unlike Yokomizo, Sanders connected with the families who volunteered, scheduling appointments after nightfall, lugging a stepladder and his Canon Rebel camera to a few homes each night for several weeks.
“I was going from house to house,” he said. “I would shoot from three to five dif- ferent families each night. There was a lot of laugh- ing with them as we were doing this. It was so much fun. Then of course, came all the hard work – the five months of labor, slowly de- veloping each image to its conclusion, developing to the point where all of the images reach their apex as one whole. It was really amazing.”
While it’s not immediately obvious to an untrained eye, the final images are composites. Sanders took about 200 photos of each subject, then worked to blend the elements of those images in a way that brought out the best representation of each moment in time.
He admits to having a few favorites in the exhibit, but one in particular stands out. “The EMT (Cerame) who was going through a rough time,” Sanders reflected. “He was dealing with so much on a daily basis, you could see the weight of it on his face.”
“It was very, very scary,” recalled Shea. Cerame would leave each night for 12-hour shifts during which he wore double masks and other personal protective covering, return home and disinfect everything he had on, placing his clothes in garbage bags, sterilizing any plates and utensils he used, wiping his shoes with disinfectant. The next day, he would do it all again.
For two months, Shea said, she and Cerame saw no one and went nowhere. Often, at the height of the pandemic, Cerame would repeatedly have to pronounce people suffering from the disease dead, a task that took an emotional as well as physical toll. “It was extremely hard,” she said.
Other photos in the exhibit capture lighter moments in the lives of families under quarantine.
The Graiff family peered out their window at photographer Adam Sanders when he snapped the photo as part of his “Dear Neighbor: A Covid Diary of a Small Town” on dis- play at the Atlantic Highlands Arts Council.
“I just liked that he was doing something positive,” said Lauren Ziemski, whose family moved to Atlantic Highlands three years ago. “I could sort of see that he was representing a wide variety of people – and I wanted to see what the rest of the people in my town looked like,” she said.
The mother of a 6-year-old and an almost 3-year-old, Ziemski said she was surprised at how messy her house looked when she first saw their photo. “There were sippy cups and bottles, mail unopened – I was wishing this looked a little neater.”
On reflection, though, Ziemski said, “There’s something kind of beautiful and poetic about this.”
“Now we’re starting to recognize our neighbors,” said Angelo Natoli, who moved to Atlantic Highlands from Brooklyn last year. “It ended up being a lovely project for a lovely, lovely town in New Jersey. It’s a snapshot in time – a scary time.”
The article originally appeared in the Sept. 24 – 30, 2020 print edition of The Two River Times.
